Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his department taking so that Locum Doctors are not being used to fill permanent posts.

The Department is committed to ensuring that trusts can fill permanent medical posts in the most cost-effective way and this means training, recruiting and retaining doctors in these posts on substantive National Health Service contracts rather than relying on locums.

We are addressing the challenge in a variety of ways.

We are increasing the supply of doctors into the NHS. By 2020 there will be an extra 1,500 students entering medical training each year; 630 of these additional trainees took up places on medical courses in September 2018, bringing the total intake for 2018/19 to 6,701. A further 690 places are available this year (2019/20) and the remaining 180 will be available next year (2020/21).

NHS Improvement is working in partnership with NHS Employers to improve staff retention in trusts across England. In July 2017 they launched a major programme which, through targeted support to all NHS trusts in England, aims to stabilise and then bring down leaver rates by 2020. The trust sector has also introduced a number of initiatives including promoting the benefits of NHS employment over agency work, making improvements to NHS staff banks, and increasing the flexibility of substantive contracts.

Even with these measures, it will still be necessary to occasionally use locum doctors to fill vacancies whilst recruitment is taking place so our efforts are also focused on reducing the cost of agency staff.

We are doing this through the use of agency expenditure ceilings, price caps on agency rates and procurement frameworks. As a result, trusts have reduced their total annual expenditure on agency staff by £1.2 billion - from £3.6 billion in 2015/16 to £2.4 billion in 2017/18. This reduction includes a £400 million fall in medical locum expenditure. To further reduce agency spending, and support flexible working, we are also working with NHS Improvement to facilitate the development of tech-enabled staff banks, covering all staff groups, in all trusts.